SRI LANKAN CATHOLIC IDENTITY AND THE 2019 EASTER BOMBINGS

On Easter Sunday 2019, nearly 300 people were killed in several coordinated bomb attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka.

Several Christian communities spread across the island nation were targeted in the attacks: Eight suicide bombers of the National Towheeth Jama’ath, a little-known group which claimed affiliation with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), detonated one set of bombs at churches in the cities of Colombo and Negombo on the western coast, home to many Sinhalese-speaking Catholics. Another was detonated in a Protestant church 200 miles away – in Batticaloa, a city in the Tamil majority eastern side of the island.

Approximately, 7%of Sri Lanka’s 21 million are Christian. The majority of them are Roman Catholic.

Even for a nation state that has seen decades of ethnic violence and political turmoil, the bombings were shocking.  The immediate aftermath saw representatives of the Catholic, Muslim, and Buddhist communities come together to condemn the bombings—though Muslims were soon targeted by the government under the pretext of anti-terrorism protections.  For the Catholic community, getting to the truth behind the bombings posed a number of discursive and political challenges, especially when evidence emerged of government complicity in the attacks.  In what follows in my proposed paper description, I will first present an overview of the history of Catholicism in Sri Lanka, then focus on the Catholic response to the bombings.  Centering on the public pronouncements of Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, I will argue that what has emerged in the Catholic response is what could be called a Sri Lankan nationalism of the common good, which is simultaneously prophetic and, interestingly, non-sectarian except with regard to one particular issue that has vexed Sri Lankan Catholicism just as it has Sri Lankan society as a whole.

Sri Lanka’s Catholics have a long history that reflects the dynamics of colonialism as well as present-day ethnic and religious tensions.

It was Portuguese colonialism that opened the door for Roman Catholicism into the island nation.  In 1505, the Portuguese came to Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called, in a trade agreement with King Vira Parakramabahu VII and later intervened in succession struggles in local kingdoms.

Later, when the Dutch and the Dutch East India Company displaced the Portuguese, Roman Catholicism was revived through the efforts of St. Joseph Vaz. Vaz was a priest from Goa, Portugal’s colony in India, and arrived in Sri Lanka in 1687. Vaz is credited with a number of miracles, such as bringing rain during a drought and taming a rogue elephant. Pope Francis made Joseph Vaz a saint in 2015.

By 1948, when Sri Lanka gained independence from Great Britain, Catholics had established a distinct identity. For example, Catholics would display the papal flag along with Sri Lanka’s national flag during Independence Day celebrations.

But tensions rose in 1960 when the Sri Lankan government compromised the Catholic Church’s independence by taking over church schools. In 1962, there was an attempted coup by Catholic and Protestant Sri Lankan army officers to overthrow the government of then prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, allegedly in response to increased Buddhist presence in the military.

The 25-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War, starting in 1983, divided the Catholic community. The war was fought against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, who sought a separate state for Sri Lanka’s Tamil community in the northern and eastern parts of the island. The rebels included Catholics in military positions. But the Sri Lankan army also had Christian members holding leadership ranks.

Recent years have seen the rise of militant forms of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Christians have been among its targets. For example, the ultra-nationalist Buddhist organization, the Bodu Bala Sena (also known as Buddhist Power Force) demanded that Pope Francis apologize for the “atrocities” committed by colonial powers.

Stepping back and characterizing this history as a whole, while the connection between Catholicism and colonialism is undeniable it would be wrong to say that Sri Lankan identity and Catholic identity are necessarily opposed, particularly when it comes to Sinhalese Catholics. Nevertheless, the Catholic church has often had to tread a fine line in its relationship with the Buddhist majority and extremist governments.  In response to the bombings, the archbishop of Columbo, Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, has assumed a central role.  He called for forgiveness and reconciliation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.  Once evidence suggested government complicity in the bombings, Cardinal Ranjith successively called for the resignation of President Maitripala Sirisena and then Gotabaya Rajapaksa during the economic crisis that became particularly acute in 2022.  After the recent airing of a Channel 4 investigative report implicating intelligence services in orchestrating the bombing to help then Presidential candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa win election on a law and order platform, Ranjith called for prosecutions and an independent international commission to investigate the Easter attacks.  Sri Lankan Catholics continue to demonstrate, including raising black flags at churches and intersections in the Negombo area, called "Little Rome," where most of the bombings took place.

Cardinal Ranjith is an interesting figure to take up an anti-government position.  I do think it would be fair to say that his vision for Sri Lanka extends the Catholic church’s voice from sectarian concerns to more broader issues concerning social justice.  Indeed, I think it would also be fair and accurate to describe his position as a kind of nationalism of the common good.

But to conclude, it is crucial to understand that Sri Lankan Catholic identity significantly involves the Tamil community on the northern and eastern parts of the island.  The Tamil press has labeled Ranjith "a late convert" to an anti-government position given his reputation as an apologist for government actions during the civil war.  The seeming exclusion of the Tamil community and specifically Tamil Catholics in discussions of the bombings’ aftermath suggest that this vision of a common good has yet to unite Tamil and Sinhalese Catholics when it comes to issues of religious and national identity.